re: Is the news more depressing now or has it always been awful?

I think there has always been terrible fricked up people in the world, word of the isolated horrible events just didnt travel nearly as fast as it does now. Couple that with a news media industry driven by viewing numbers to satisfy advertising metrics and not just "the news". They are always going to lean towards the most shocking/attention grabbing stories, which tend to be the angering/divisive/disturbing ones and not the happy/celebratory/feel good stories.

It's always happened, but now we have:

1) 24/7 news

2) The Internet and social media where you can read about any and every strange story.

If any of you baws here were of age in the 90's, you might remember Susan Smith. She put her two kids in a car and pushed it in a lake (they died by drowning). She then lied and said a black man kidnapped them. It made national news and was all over TV back then - mostly because of her lying and manipulation.

Oh, and then you had Diane Downs in the early 80's. She shot and killed her kids in the car and then claimed someone tried to carjack her and the robber killed the kids (very similar story to what Susan Smith would use 10 years later).

Diane Downs was one evil woman. She laughed during her interrogation.

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Is the news more depressing now or has it always been awful?

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Since Trump was elected, we have gotten at least one story every week that would be a year long story back in the 70's. And they would be wall to wall on every cable for weeks to months. It has accelerated FAR worse since Biden got into office, of course.

Things are not only worse, but the veil is just totally gone now. We are seeing their mask fully off, at this point. They can do that because they've trained half of us people to totally DISREGARD what we're actually seeing with our eyes. They've made half of us hate the constitution. The internet has made it impossible for them to control enough information flow that in a "free society" we can't NOT be onto their shenanigans... which is kinda nice? I guess?

America is objectively -way- worse than we have ever been, and since we are the leader of the west, so too is the rest of the western world.

We are living in a truly bad timeline. It isn't just "oh, it's always been this bad." While it's true, it really HAS been awful very deep into our past with regards to corruption.. the part that gets lost on people saying "nothing is different, we just see them now," is that over the past 100 years ALL of those corruptions have led to total instability, a useless dollar, the worst sum of corruption in our congress ever, and FULL foreign influence on our msm/hollywood/silicon valley etc. It's time to pay the piper. The people have let this go on far too long to course correct. We bought into the puppet on the left vs the puppet on the right for FAR too long.

We are weaker, weirder, more confused and totally more dysfunctional than we have ever been.

:fkitdudeletsgobowlingmeme:

Stop voting for the same fking people, ladies and gentlemen. Stop buying the illusion that you HAVE to vote to beat the "other side." Write in who you want, but don't vote for someone you don't believe in just to "win." We will continue to lose and stay on the exact same path if we keep doing the same damn thing. Wake. Up. McFly!

Dude the news has never been upbeat and cheery. It's always been depressing.
Even before tv Newspapers knew that sensational headlines sold papers.
I remember growing up as a young kid in the 70's thinking, why do people watch this stuff? It's all bad news. Except for the last segment on Friday. They'd have a nice little fluff story to head into the weekend.
I don't watch the news because it's depressing. It's all doom and gloom. It's not good for mental health. Especially now that we have 24hrs news.

If you think the world is worse now, what do you think people were getting away with when there weren't hundreds of cameras everywhere?

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good news doesn't attract viewers.

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The saying in the industry is "if it bleeds, it leads"

Computers. Cell phones. Social media. etc. etc. etc. Fall of the world as "we" have known it.